Short length messages are routinely exchanged in areas of command and control, features that are fundamental to almost all modern electronic systems. To build reliability into such systems necessitates resilience of the underlying communications infrastructure. During the transfer of data the received data is often corrupted with errors due to noise in the communications system. Alternatively, it is possible for errors to occur in data stored to memory.
In order to help correct any errors, data is often encoded using error correction codes to form a codeword before it is transferred, be that a transferral over a communications channel or to store data over memory. When a corrupted codeword is received, a decoder may be used to correct any errors. Much work, research and implementation, has been done in the area of long channel codes for adding redundancy to multimedia data in the event of impairments; however, little work has been done in the area of developing practical decoding solutions for channel codes in the region of 30-300 bits in length.